I wish I could say, after 10 days in the new year, that I was seeing all sorts of life-changing things happening thanks to my new found “deliberate” mindset. Not that I expected to, but I just want to make sure it was clear that nothing magical had happened yet.
I think about the word a lot, and find myself asking if whatever I was doing was a deliberate choice, or just the easy way out. Unfortunately, the answer continues to often be that I am just taking the lazy choice, rather than deliberating doing something that furthers one of my goals, but I figure that acknowledging my laziness is half the battle to conquering it.
One thing I have done deliberately is to begin actively seeking out the training I have been thinking I would like to do in the field of web design. In the past, I have bought a book here, fiddled with Dreamweaver there, poked around in the code of my various websites, but I’m just faking it. I would really like to actually KNOW how it works, and the only way to do that is to actually dive in and learn it. I paid for a month’s access to Lynda.com and am on my third training course (Dreamweaver CS5 Essential Training, in case anyone is wondering). I am thoroughly impressed by the quality of the instruction, the quality of the videos, and the depth and breadth of the available courses. This current course is a little slow for me personally, but I’m the kind of student that sits in the back of the class and fiddles around and jumps ahead in the handout and figures things out by myself, so the course itself is probably just fine, I just have to struggle with being who I am. It’s a trial, some days.
But! I am deliberately making myself listen to the entire course, even if that means I have to knit while he’s talking, in order to keep my hands busy, so I can concentrate. I’ve already learned a bunch of things I didn’t know before and have clarified some things I already sort of knew. So far the fee to Lynda.com has been worth every penny.
How about all of you? Is your new year off to a positive start?
